Blogging in Spanish, Lindsey Mangurten, Lincoln Park High School

For this lesson I had the Spanish classes creating blogs about festivals in Spanish Speaking Countries. I used kidblog for the students to create their blogs. I really like kidblog for the ease for the class and for the teacher. Instead of the students emailing the blog link to the teacher, all of the web links are in one place and the students can browse and comment on each others pages. The students log in to their teachers pages, select their class period and find their own accounts.

Before the class came in I got the class roster from the teacher and created accounts for all of the students. I used the password, ‘password’ for everyone. This can only work if you trust your students not to go on someone elses page and do something inappropriate. In the past I did have a student erase another students work out of malice and I was not able to prove who had done it. If you don’t trust the students you can create more difficult passwords but for ease of time I used “password”. The teacher and I discussed this prior to beginning and since it was an upper level Junior/Senior class we felt that we could trust the kids to remain on their own pages exclusively.  

I spent about 15 minutes in the beginning of the period demonstrating how to log in, upload photos, and add and edit text. The platform is very user friendly and the students were quickly able to start adding in their own information.

Because it was a spanish class the students were required to write in Spanish. In order to do that, the students typed in google docs and were going to copy/paste the text into kidblog. I also showed the students how to add accents and tildes and other spanish markings using google docs. The students were able to select

-insert

-special characters

-draw what they were looking for

-select the proper letter and accent mark

We found the drawing tool to be the easiest to use since the font was so small for some of the accents to truly decipher what they were. Once the students had completed typing in Spanish they copy/pasted their final product into kidblog before publishing their work. I highly recommend kidblog for blog creation in class. It is private, free and user friendly.